What is happening to us and our precious world? This is the open-ended, but urgent question that many have been asking themselves in 2024, a year of multiple crises, ranging from extinction and climate disasters to continued poverty, inequality, and brutal wars.
In the face of these predicaments we urge all authors to write about people, because people are always thinking and talking about people, and if we still believe in democracy, in the age of mass communication, only people can help us out of the current impasse? Strong community belonging separating “us” from “them” remains a fact and an obstacle, as demonstrated in the US elections of 2024. Can humans in the next decade be intertwined in this historic aim of coming together? Through kindness? Revolution? Or will a yet-unknown form of solidarity provide a new basis for democracy?
Bombarded by knowledge from a wide array of sources and old social structures, we search for a path to a new understanding of nature, class and humanity. Can a new understanding evolve through a way of speaking and writing that tolerates disagreement and respects the integrity of the individual in open societies, rather than acting through false oppositions and conspiracy “theories”. Perhaps this path eventually leads to a new area of storytelling, of poetry, or a yet unknown combination of genres and modes of expressions and political actions. Nature poetry in its origin used to be more meditational than intellectual, more grounded in community than abstractions; still oriented towards a harsh environment.
We also ask questions like this — pick & choose:
• How are the environmental overheating and misuse of fossil fuel resources reflected in the ways people in your surroundings talk to you, talk about themselves, in your family circles, your neighborhood, city, nation?
• Does knowledge of these crisis have a tangible impact on their (our) behavior?
• How does the overwhelming crisis of nature influence your own way of thinking and acting — about other people, your close ones, colleagues, and not the least, in your own writing?
What is happening with the ways we relate to and use language when we know that the humble microbe can win wars and topples empires (see e.g. Jonathan Kennedy, Willam McNeil), or that AI will cause severe disruption to our ways of being people, communicate and create, be it for better or for worse? The German scientist Stefan Rahmstorf has for years shown that the the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is about to reach its tipping point, a conjecture that has recently been supported by new scientific evidence. How can our culture, immersed in day-to-day affairs, respond to the perspective of such a sudden and deep upheaval? Insane temperature records from the East Antarctic and Northern Africa makes us long for some sanity. The Saiga Antelope and the Hawaiian Crow express more than urgency in our confused attention, that is: dignity.
• What literary sources, what experiences, historical, spiritual and personal, can help us out?
• Can the perspectives of unpredictable pressures on ecological niches of plants and animals, as discussed by Adam Welz, offer us new lessons about how societies and even individual lives can change in novel ways, independently of top-down government planning and international agreements?
• What can we hope for, except for the unexpected?
Within this essayistic way of asking a variety of complex questions, the essential one is how people react to an overflow of information about a canceled future, and how we as authors tackle this informational climate crisis, which split populations between an elite and a (right-wing) populism of denial and despair.
In the dark times of climate breakdown, war and geopolitical crisis, and without sharing the fate of Cassandra, we encourage our authors to do what they do best: inspire, provoke and enlighten. Great literary works have always found the most sensitive and surprising ways to rethink ourselves and our environment, by speaking to us and within us, about us and between us. Through the spacetime of AI power, resilient traditions of literature can transform to be torches of hope.
In the months to come our invited authors will offer us their fresh perspectives on these matters.
On behalf of NWCC,
Freddy Fjellheim Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Editor-in-Chief Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
Headline photo: AI / WordPress
KLIMAAKSJON / NORWEGIAN WRITERS´ CLIMATE CAMPAIGN // NWCC 